Monday, 23 April 2012

As reported in ITProPortal, HTC's Creative Director Claude Zellweger, speaking at a recent trade event, believes that HTC should drop physical keyboards for haptic (on-screen, with a buzz when you touch a "key") ones.

Yeah, because there's nothing that improves usability of a smartphone more than having half the screen real estate eaten by a haptic keyboard, is there?

The Desire Z, with the flip-out keyboard, was probably the best all-round handset HTC ever made. It was (and is) a passable laptop replacement for short trips, and it's pocketable. As a business tool it's near-perfect, far better than anything Apple's produced.

And now they're also saying that underpowered batteries are necessary "in order to respect design principles"?

On precisely which planet do "design principles" not include the practical needs of their customers?

Obviously HTC believes that they're channelling the late Steve Jobs' "reality distortion field". Sadly, they're going to discover that at the end of that field is a steep cliff, and they're walking backwards towards it, waving cheerily back at the people frantically trying to warn them.

About Me

I'm a CEO/CTO who's also a hard-core techie; a dad of two; a writer, a lapsed flyer who wants his wings back, a maker, an incompetent musician who still likes to play, and a surfer who hasn't got his board wet for way too long.